


the rain is full of ghosts tonight

by asexualizing (Specialcookies)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Death, F/F, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-27
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-22 16:57:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13171233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Specialcookies/pseuds/asexualizing
Summary: There is always a moment to remember.





	the rain is full of ghosts tonight

**Author's Note:**

> personally, i see this one as a companion piece to [i'm a cartoon, you're a full moon, let's stay up](http://archiveofourown.org/works/13103247), but really you don't have to.
> 
> title comes from _What Lips My Lips Have Kissed_ by Edna St. Vincent Millay and i might have slipped a jeiwsh reference in there
> 
> here's to you, carrie.

There is always a moment to remember.

A kiss, shared by two women who had found each other not by chance and not by luck and not by the binding Force, but by their own will: their own will to do more good for their own good, their own will to not be contained by meaninglessness, their own will to fight a fight that can only be fought together. This one Leia remembers with a razor-sharp clarity; time could not fade the brightness of Amilyn’s hair between her fingers, the tingle in her lips as they touched Amilyn’s, Alderaan’s ancient structures still and quiet around them, serene as if the then that belonged there has welcomed the now like it equally belonged in the same place, like Leia’s home was telling her: this. This. This. And it felt as if the call of her soul was answered, back then, as if the waging war inside of her for once found peace. She cried thinking of Kier, and she cried thinking of what’s to come, and Amilyn’s lips were a constant of relief. Were the only points of balance on a steep climb to the top. 

Amilyn had been… never simply beautiful, always mesmerising, unexplainable, odd in a way that Leia had learnt to find interesting, attractive, and then became so familiar she had begun to see everybody else as the odd ones. Her eyes were wild and her fingers were gentle; she kissed Leia with a rush of breath coming out of her that sounded like life itself. She pulled back slowly, she wiped Leia’s tears, she had that frown that Leia had only ever seen appear when Amilyn looked at her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, steady voice, not angry at Leia but angry at somebody; trembling hands. Leia did not know how to tell her that everything only _had_ been wrong and _will_ be wrong but right now, right here, nothing. Such nothing that Leia wished to feel again.

So she smiled, or rather couldn’t help but smiling, pulled Amilyn back down and stretched herself as far as she could and kissed and kissed and kissed her.

It couldn’t have been the giddy, giggly first kiss that people their age were supposed to have. But Leia is glad, now, looking back, that it wasn’t. At the time she thought it wasn’t fair, but lightyears ahead she knows only this could have been special enough to survive two wars and a galaxy that insisted on keeping them apart for the better part of a lifetime.

A lifetime that is far too long to live in, Leia thinks, fingers at her temples and eyes shut tight. Rain is tapping heavily on the roof of the new base, carrying with its presence in the Force the absence, the hollowness, of Amilyn. It is accompanied by heavy murmurs of a Resistance that is building itself up, and Leia knows that she should be out there, but she is tired and she thinks that she should let herself be, just for a while. So she had locked herself in the farthest chamber she could have found.

She wonders briefly if she can cut herself off like Luke, if she has that kind of control within her, if she can experience that particular kind of grief. She hadn’t thought Luke capable of it, but evidently, he was. 

She never tried before. Not when she lost Ben, not when Han fled, came back only to never come back again ( _“No one’s ever really gone,” Amilyn used to muse. “How can that be?” Leia thought she couldn’t comprehend her, but the truth is she only couldn’t believe what she was saying was true, until it became the only truth that she could handle_ ). Not when Luke resisted her tries to reach him again and again, when another war had to happen and when the losses kept building up like a crescendo of death and destruction. She wonders if, when Alderaan was destroyed, she had known what the emptiness inside her meant…

But there is always a moment to remember.

Tangled legs under covers, hands held tight, minds naïve enough to believe that everything will end up being just as it’s supposed to be. Just as it used to be before they were even born. Just as it will always be when they are lying in a bed together, naïve enough to believe that they will see each other again. Leia can almost make out the shape of it in the Force, can almost believe that there is something still there. 

“Like the wind,” Amilyn had told her when Leia said she sometimes believes that she can feel everything, from the roots under the ground to the farthest star in the farthest system. Although she had gotten better at understanding what Amilyn meant when she spoke, at that she raised an eyebrow. Amilyn never hesitated to explain.

“You touch nothing and everything all at once.”

She thought that Amilyn had died on Alderaan alongside her entire world – past, present, future – waiting for its princess to come back to her open arms, warm lips, sharp mind. She heard her voice in her head saying, _you would always blame yourself, but nobody else would, because that is how sacrificing yourself works._

She carried on.

There are several knocks on her door that Leia chooses to ignore, and then the rain is drowning in silence. No murmurs, no steps, just a tap-tap-tap of life. 

It’s a funny thing, really, life. Full of lessons. She had always expected those to come and thought that preparation was key, that if she would teach them to herself it would be so much easier to handle it all, but rather than succeeding or failing in her intentions there always was simply the unexpected: lessons of life does not come in formal shapes and forms, and does not carry the meanings one might expect them to. That first time seeing Amilyn on a mountain of snow that does not exist anymore, that is just as absent and hollow as Amilyn, Leia was trying to determine something that a sixteen-year-old, even if she’s a princess, shouldn’t have to determine, and found that she only fooled herself into believing that she could.

But sixteen was the age of revelations. Leia tends to look back at it fondly, but not too fondly; there was something dark hiding behind the corners of their being, haunting them before they even knew they could be haunted. The both of them, dancing at the edge of understanding what life truly meant in this galaxy, were happy without realising that that what they were. The kind of happy you can only know of after the fact, when there is no way for you to ever reach it again. The kind of happy that Amilyn used to say she wishes she could keep hidden in her palms, so when she cradles Leia’s face with them it will wash through her. It can only be like this before you _know_ , before every emotion becomes razor-sharp because you have to cherish whatever you can put your hands on. At the age of sixteen, they have just begun to learn.

Whatever Amilyn believes that Leia had taught her, she doesn’t know that Leia couldn’t have learnt it herself without Amilyn at her side. Without her bringing her home time and time again, whether it be a physical place or some emotion that began to crumble, putting her together when she thought she couldn’t possibly be whole again, seeing whatever Leia couldn’t notice, coming back and back and back to Leia.

_Always. Always, she knows. There is always a moment to remember._

A hug full to the brink and spilling with time that was lost. A look shared between two women who can only understand each other. A knowing smile of honest joy at a life that could have been theirs, but weren’t. Warm thighs and bellies that had gotten soft, soft, softer. Brushing shoulders, arms around waists, weights that are held by more than the one that should carry them. Laughter. Love. Happiness.

Leia feels the Force seeping through her veins like never before. She is tired. Truly, deeply tired. Her bones ache with it. The crescendo of death and destruction quiets, recedes. Ben, Luke, Han, Amilyn… one by one the remnants of her have left. Somehow, she is more complete than ever before. 

Amilyn would tell her to let go as she massaged her shoulders. Not of life, not of hope, not of the light; of the misery, the pain, the anger. She had felt it in Leia, and she knew. While everybody else believed that Leia only fought one fight, Amilyn had known which fight to help her through. When she had laid above her in Leia’s bed and whispered, _let go, let go, let go,_ she knew.

Tranquillity. It had always alluded Leia, somehow; tantalised her, even. But now…  She had said it enough. _May the Force be with you._ A blessing of hope, a blessing to march on. She had taught and fought to teach the only thing she was sure with absolute certainty that she can do, the only thing she was sure with absolute certainty that the galaxy needed: hope against all hope, love against all logic. Her mother used to tell her a fable about lost people and a little cruse of oil that only meant to last a night but kept the lights on and on and on until the people found themselves again. She often thought her mother was referring to Alderaan. She now knows her mother looked at _her_ and saw an endless source of light. She now knows what her mother meant by answering her questions of “how long?” with “long enough.”.

She reaches out to the Force and feels her Resistance. Feels its leader, feels its hope, feels its beating heart. She had said it enough. 

She reaches out and to the Force and feels Luke. He isn’t calling to her, he is waiting. 

 _We are going to be okay_ , he says.

She reaches out to the Force and feels and absence, the hollowness of Amilyn.

And Leia knows, with as much certainty as she knows each drop of rain that is falling right now, that she had kept the light on for long enough.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> find me on [tumblr!](http://asexualizing.tumblr.com)


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